Asus Maximus IX Hero only 6 SATA?

Katanga · 22 Jan 2017 at 16:03

Thinking about this board, need 7 SATA ports though inc 1 for optical drive.

Now, this board has an M2 slot, right? my question is, can I populate all 6 SATA ports and the M2 port without any loss in performance or anything else?

Assuming I can, what would be a good OS M2 to buy, capacity of 120GB should suffice as that has always done me for standard OS SSD's in the past.

Thanks.

IvanDobskey · 23 Jan 2017 at 07:18

I think the hero has 8 sata ports?

Although i believe using the m2 slot will disable two of them.

Katanga · 23 Jan 2017 at 10:44

IvanDobskey said:
I think the hero has 8 sata ports?

Although i believe using the m2 slot will disable two of them.

Hi, thanks for replying, deffo only 6 SATA ports and 2 M2 Slots ...

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/asus-rog-maximus-ix-hero-intel-z270-socket-1151-ddr4-atx-motherboard-mb-68q-as.html

So, if what you say is true (and what I feared) if using an M2 slot and drive I will drop to 4 regular SATA 6G ports, and say I were to use the two M2 slots (that I may do in the future) I will then drop to just 2 regular SATA 6G ports?

Thats no use to me I'm afraid

Can someone please confirm about this please, almost impulse purchased last night actually, but really need to know about this so held off. Looking to buy 270 soon almost certainly and need more than 6 SATA, though 6 SATA and one M2 would work.

Thanks.

IvanDobskey · 23 Jan 2017 at 12:39

It only disables the ports if you run the m.2 in SATA mode. So I think you can get a more expensive m.2 SSD that uses the pcie lanes instead.

There are 8 SATA ports, 2 Intel ones, 2 ASMedia ones, and then the 4 shared with the SATA express ports.

bfar · 26 Jan 2017 at 17:49

a cheap external optical drive might help?

tom01 · 3 Feb 2017 at 04:33

You could get an M.2 that utilises NVME (This will use PCIe bus and save you a SATA port).

Silent_Scone · 12 Feb 2017 at 09:15

Running a PCIE_M.2 drive in m.2_1 will result in all 6 SATA ports still being accessible.

Running either type in m.2_2 will result in either running at half speed or SATA 5 and 6 being disabled.

magpie1966 · 12 Feb 2017 at 15:02

yep what Silent Scone said..

KingDazza · 13 Feb 2017 at 16:36

The Maximus Formula IX only has 6 so I put in a PCIe x 1 card in to give another 2 sata connections for optical and hot swap hdd bay. £30 ish for the sata card.